Windows Azure Connect compatibility on Windows 8/2012 Release Preview

17th of June, 2012 / / 6 Comments

We recently had the need to connect local endpoint to an Azure instance as part of a scalable load testing rig. To do this remote Visual Studio load test Agents are installed in a Web Role and connect back to a local Controller located somewhere closer to Visual Studio so we can generate *lots* of traffic close to the target application but get results back in Visual Studio.

Running Visual Studio 12 and Windows 8 Release Preview sometimes adds to the complexity.… [Keep reading] “Windows Azure Connect compatibility on Windows 8/2012 Release Preview”

Publish Content to the Azure CDN with URLRewrite

23rd of May, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network (CDN) is a distributed network of servers that will cache and serve content from edge nodes closer to the user’s browser. By utilising this functionality websites can offload much of their static content delivery to those servers saving valuable web processing and bandwidth for core business related activities and giving the user a better online experience.

A CDN should be considered for delivering content for Internet workloads that exhibit:

  • Static or slow changing content
  • Content shared by many users
  • Geographically dispersed users
  • Ad-hoc or irregular usage (and therefore don’t get the benefit of the browser cache)
  • Expensive or saturated bandwidth connections

One or more of these characteristics is an indicator that a CDN may be a worthwhile investment, but the investment need not be a large one.… [Keep reading] “Publish Content to the Azure CDN with URLRewrite”

Cloud Revolution – The Blind Entrepreneur

6th of December, 2011 / / 1 Comment

[Following from Cloud Revolution]

Profitable since the first quarter, 375 million page views per month, $4 million in annual revenue, 75 employees and $30 million in venture funding. Certainly sounds like a successful business, and it is.

I Can Has Cheezburger has leveraged the initial success of that hit web site by launching hundreds of other similar but slightly different sites based on the original. Many of these sites fail to attract traffic and are shut down within weeks, but every now and then one works, like “Fail Blog” or “Totally looks like“.… [Keep reading] “Cloud Revolution – The Blind Entrepreneur”

Cloud Revolution – The Late Night Scientist

6th of December, 2011 / / 1 Comment

[Following from Cloud Revolution]

It’s late at night in January and an email just arrived that has someone very excited. A medical student has won an auction, but this is no eBay auction, it’s an Amazon EC2 instance auction. She has been preparing for this moment for over a year and will make or break her post-doctoral research paper.

She is continuing the valuable work done by her predecessors in the field of on Parkinson’s research and its relationship to dopamine levels in the brain.… [Keep reading] “Cloud Revolution – The Late Night Scientist”

Cloud Revolution – The New Cottage Industry

6th of December, 2011 / / 1 Comment

[Following from Cloud Revolution]

In a small office in the back of a house in Melbourne is a business taking on the big players in their own backyard. Running a photo library and acting as an intermediary between a carefully chosen group of photographers and a select genre of magazines and publications.

A new photo shoot has just been uploaded from Hungary to the hosting site and a notification email has been sent. The shoot is first quality controlled, categorised and submitted for key wording using one of the new “mechanical turk” cloud services that provide an electronic portal into large, on demand, pools of human labour.… [Keep reading] “Cloud Revolution – The New Cottage Industry”

Cloud Revolution

28th of November, 2011 / / 3 Comments

There has been much focus recently on cloud computing and its adoption (or not) by the enterprise. Although most cloud vendors are understandably keeping their cards close to the chest, by all reports the enterprise uptake has been slow.
The problem as I see it thus far has been:

  1. Enterprises are notoriously bad at costing internal IT infrastructure. For 20 years the IT department has sat comfortably in the corner of the office occasionally ducking in and out of that off-limits humming room with no windows speaking a secret coded language of CAT-5 cables and firewalls.
… [Keep reading] “Cloud Revolution”

Cloud Power

8th of November, 2011 / / No Comments

While there are many definitions of cloud computing published on the Internet most fall short on perspective. Cloud computing is touted as everything from just a rebadge of existing technology to a whole new paradigm shift in information technology. To determine the truth, it’s worthwhile taking a step back to get some perspective on computing technology and where we are in the information technology maturity cycle.

History Repeating

We’ve been here before albeit with other technologies.… [Keep reading] “Cloud Power”